Introduction: Radical Politics, Bifurcations, and the Event

So far, this book has focused on what could be described as one side of a series of bifurcations, both within modes of action and organization in radical politics and, as will be shown in the remainder of this book, between radical politics and radical media. It is not simply the case that certain individuals chose to adopt a clandestine, guerrilla mode of political organization, as opposed to either continued involvement in mass political movements or the elaboration of radical modes of media expression, even if this decision seems to characterize the biographies of some of the participants, especially of RAF and Weather. The bifurcations were rather collective and machinic processes of splitting and transformation that affected entire political movements as they encountered different and antagonistic series of events characterized both by the increasing radicalization of social movements and their increasing repression at the hands of police and other repressive state apparatuses, such as state security forces of various kinds.

In the 1970s, this turn towards clandestine political violence was by no means a marginal phenomenon, even if it was engaged in by a minority of even the most politically engaged militants. At the same time, these phenomena have been persistently misunderstood, whether as irrelevant or marginal to the movements from which they emerged, or as responsible for their destruction whether inadvertently or as part of some conspiratorial state strategy. Such seems to be the point of view of critics as divergent as Todd Gitlin on the one hand, and Felix Guattari and Toni Negri on the other; the latter describing, in New Forms of Alliance, what they call the terrorist interlude as follows: ‘from all points of view, red terrorism was a disastrous interlude for the movement’ (Guattari and Negri 2010, p. 70).